Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
A politician who served as a Labour MP and Cabinet minister before co-founding the Social Democratic Party (SDP).
On the island
Eight records
Introduction and Allegro for Strings, Op. 47Favourite
Well, my first choice, which is Elgar's Introduction to Allegro, is a choice partly because it shows, I think, some of the extraordinarily sort of stormy temperament that Elgar had, and also because for me it's associated with my family and with their strange mixture of great patriotism and great criticism of their own country.
My second record really reflects that time, and also reflects my mother's friendship with Benjamin Britton and Peter Peirce, with whom she went round the country. Lecturing and of course playing music and singing on their part in order to raise money for the movement to provide food for what was then a starving Europe, including a starving Germany.
What could be better than Guys and Dolls composed by Frank Loeser, which I remember first seeing in an absolutely riotous performance in New York when I was out there on a scholarship to Columbia University, and incidentally, of course, and inevitably decided to fall in love at that point.
And one of the pieces of music I always associate with that, and associate generally with America, because it's so Fresh and so exciting, and so full of promise and optimism is the Composition Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copeland, who is probably one of the greatest contemporary American composers.
And I also remember the music associated with that time, and one of the more haunting love songs of the time was Scarborough Fair, sung by that marvellous team, Simon and Garfunkel.
And that brings me really to a record which always reminds me of the times I spend, particularly in France. Which is the lovely song cycle by Berlioz, the great French composer, called Nuit d'Eté. And this is Janet Baker singing The Villa Nell in that cycle as beautifully as ever.
La forza del destino: Overture
And there's an opera by one of my favourite composers, perhaps my favorite composer opera, except for Mozart, namely Guisepe Verdi, a very political composer incidentally, who was very much involved in the Unification of Italy movement. And in his overture to Fozza del Destino, in a way he's exactly summing up in marvellous music that sense of the power of destiny which you can only ride but can't control.
Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58: II. Andante con moto
So the slow movement that speaks to me when I'm trying to get beyond the daily world of politics and the clashes and confrontations. One of many, but a beautifully played one, is the slow movement of Beethoven's fourth concerto, and I've chosen John Lill, the great British pianist, because I think he interprets it beautifully and because his variations express the spirit in which Beethoven wrote that concerto.
Well, my first record really reflects my great fondness for one of the people who made a lot of my work in education possible, and that was my friend John Little. He was a remarkable had remarkable political insight, great devotion and commitment. And in a fairly hard life, because he was not a man who enjoyed good health, and he died young. Um I remember this always being associated with him. It was somehow it captured the nature of the man.
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, 'From the New World' (Second Movement)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Klaus Tennstedt
Well, record number two is the famous Vorjak New World Symphony. My parents, both being high minded people, wanted their children to actually live In part of the war So they sent us to America, but the minute, the minute that it was clear there wasn't going to be invasion, they tried to get us back, because, quite rightly, they thought if we were going to be part of the post-war world, we had to have had experience of the war, but not the one that might have been an absolute disaster in the sense that we might have been left orphaned and abandoned.
Peter Pears, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Britten
In nineteen forty-eight, when I was seventeen, I was sent to Germany by the British Control Commission, and I remember as we went through out of the holes in the ground, literally the holes in the ground of the cellars, there emerged these sort of ghost people who were wearing rags, desperately hungry, and they just sort of came out of the depths almost, as if it was an inferno that was down there. And so this had a great impact on me, and it was the first time that I really began to think. I put it very bluntly, that we, the Allies, were not quite as wonderful as we presented ourselves, that we were capable of shutting one's eyes to the sufferings that were going on in consequence of the war. And this war requiem, in a way, summed that up for me.
My future husband Bernard was training to be a pilot, a jet pilot in Canada, and he didn't get much leave, but on one occasion he got some leave and wanted to come and see New York. And it was very it was the beginning of Guys and Dolls. It was the earliest beginning of the run of Guys and Dolls, that great musical. But I still remember the extraordinary excitement of New York for both of us, the feeling of this incredibly lively, vivid city. And the record I'm now asking you to play sums up for me the spirit and nature of New York as at that early performance of Guys and Dolls.
Well, record number five was when I was still married to Bernard, and very happily so, and we were we had he'd just been invited to go to Ghana, which was just becoming freed from its colonial status, the first British colony in Africa to become independent. And it was a marvellous experience.
And Chariots of Fire was the Music I chose for my Crosby campaign, which was the first time anybody got elected as an STP MP in a very, very Conservative seat. It was pouring with rain, it was November, it was cold, it was bitter, we had no money, we had an open truck. And I remember for week after week Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rogers and me in this open trap with the rain often pouring down. were cheered up entirely by playing Chariots of Fire as we went round all the villages and towns of the Crosby constituency to the point where finally we had established the brand music and the brand name and people came out in their thousands to vote for the STP.
Anne Grimm, Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, conducted by Ton Koopman
I Lost Him in two thousand and three. He was of Reasonable age, but he was so wonderful as a member of our family, as the Sort of pata familias to both me and my children and my grandchildren. that we all miss him very, very badly indeed, and this sums up that sense of loss.
Messiah (How Beautiful Are the Feet)Favourite
On my mother's gravestone the proper phrase is Blessed are the Peacemakers, and this particular record sums that up for me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
5:22What do you remember best of your mother?
I suppose what I remember best about her was that in nineteen forty three, which was the middle of the war, when she'd already had quite a rough time because she was a pacifist … She got her fair share of critics and people who said that she should have thrown herself into the war effort and so on. And in nineteen forty three she went through, I think, a great crisis of conscience in which she had to decide whether or not she was going to publicly condemn What was then the new policy, the saturation bombing of Germany … And she finally concluded that she had to, even though she knew that that would bring a great deal of … anger and abuse down on the family and on my father, her husband as well. And that duly happened. She did make a public statement. She brought out a pamphlet called Seed of Chaos. She received a telegram to say her books would never again be published in America. As a family we got endless strings of abuse … and my father having to explain that he wasn't a pacifist, but finding it also necessary and indeed very willing to champion her and her own crisis of conscience, and I remember the only ally that she had was the Bishop of Chichester. And between them they really went through an extremely dark period at that time, which was only actually ended when she turned out to be, along with my father, on the Gestapo Blacklist, which was finally published because it had Churchill's name on the same page.
Presenter asks
8:56At the beginning of the war you were sent to America by your parents. Was that because they had some dark foreboding about what might happen in Britain?
No, it was one reason only, Michael, and I wasn't sent at the beginning of the war. I was sent at the end of nineteen forty when there were many fears of a German invasion. And this is because my parents have been tipped off that if there was a German invasion, they would be likely to be put in concentration camps immediately. And they spent one long night of … discussion as to what they should do and came to the conclusion that they were morally obliged to stay in Britain, that they had to face whatever might be coming to them. but that they had no right to put their children's lives at risk, so they sent my brother and me to a family we'd never met in Minnesota, who my mother had met when she was lecturing between the wars.
The keepsakes
Presenter asks
15:26Was there any doubt at all when you were growing up that you were going to be anything other than a politician?
Well, once I'd got over my early ambition to be an opera singer, the other thing I thought I wanted to be was a journalist. And so when I finally completed my various kinds of education, I started work on the Daily Mirror. But I didn't really work out very well there at all. I was a human interest reporter. And I found it really tough going. … So depart I did for the Financial Times, where I spent a very happy five years and really enjoyed myself. … More and more politics was waiting for me, and my father, who had stood twice as a parliamentary candidate, had not been successful between the wars, in a way wanted very much one of his children to go into politics, and of course we had been brought up in the Labour Party from the very beginning. So into politics I duly went.
Presenter asks
19:24What was it that made you dissatisfied, that made you want to break away from the Labour Party and form another party?
I thought you were going to say what went wrong? Well, what went wrong was that I found it increasingly difficult to identify with the historic political parties. I couldn't identify with the Conservatives who I'd fought all my life, but I couldn't really increasingly identify with the Labour Party. And I think that one of the Early seeds of the STP, one which has been very little noticed in the press. Was the strong support that those of us who later formed the SDP had for the European community? … So I think that part of the genesis of the SDP was discovering that we had a distinct position in politics which was not shared by the official leadership of the Labour Party because it was so pro-European and was not shared by the official leadership of at least it was shared by Heath, but not by his successors. So that that was a distinct position to which the final straw that was added was the worry about the Labour Party's constitutional changes to the left, which we thought were not democratic and could not be borne.
Presenter asks
22:50During your time in politics, what have been the best times?
Oh, two. One was a moment that you never can ever repeat again in politics, which is the first time you're elected, and especially if you're elected for a seat which is in the balance. … First being elected for Hitchen. Very young, lots of struggles, very exciting. And the second time, of course, being elected as the first ever Social Democratic Member of Parliament for Crosby. Which overturned a colossal Conservative majority of 19,000 plus. So those were two of the very high points in politics, the kind of moments which I suppose is exactly like singing a great aria in a opera vivdi.
Presenter asks
27:14What do you feel about Britain at present? Are you depressed, are you optimistic or what?
I'm tall. Between a sense that My country's at the crossroads. On the one side we had the decline in manufacturing and the probable running out of North Sea oil sometime in the nineteen nineties, and I think the economic situation could be dire. And we might be fighting to maintain our democracy in the face of that. On the other side, I I myself believe that the coming of the Information Society could be very good for Britain. It's a creative, inventive country with a lot of extraordinarily able people, but with a kind of determination to be individual … We could see a recreation of Britain, a kind of new dawn almost, providing that we make some decisions right. And there's one of those that to me is quite central. I think we will have to give a much higher priority to education and training.
Presenter asks
0:58Would you say that politics has been your vocation, that you didn't have a choice?
Probably. I think I started out by thinking I might want to be a journalist. When I was very young, I might want to be a farmer. But in a way, politics was insistent, and for me, it was an endless sitting in the Circle of the theatre of the world, and I found that extremely fascinating.
Presenter asks
12:05Do you remember the moment when you saw your mother again [after returning from America]?
Yes. My father came down to Bristol, which is where the plane landed, took me back in the train to London. My mother was in a meeting in Birmingham and had no idea. And so he hid me behind a curtain. And when my mother came back from her meeting in Birmingham at about eleven o'clock that night, he pulled back the curtain, and there was her daughter. ... On her side, very emotional. On my side not, because I'd learnt independence and I couldn't take the leap of the three years when she hadn't been there. So it took little time.
Presenter asks
15:19Was it difficult at home [during your mother's pacifist campaign]? Did you get personal attacks of any kind?
Oh, yes. We got various dubious things through the door, as you might imagine, all that. And she had a terribly hard time, there's no doubt about it. It was very funny. Luckily for her, It actually ended sooner than it might have done because in April 1945, The newspapers published on their front page the Gestapo blacklist, and by sheer good luck my mother, Vera Britton, my father, George Catlin, were on the same page as Churchill. And so there was in a sense the absolute proof that the Nazis hated her.
Presenter asks
23:20When once you became a Cabinet Minister, did that kind of [sexist] attitude fell away with rank?
No, not entirely. I mean, Harold Wilson was really the first Prime Minister who broke through the view that in the Cabinet there was just one woman, the statutory woman. But even so, one still did run into a certain feeling that women weren't really thoroughly serious practitioners. And if you look at the history of women in politics, Barbara Castle, Claire Short, Mrs. T, et cetera, what you find over and over again is that they tend to be outsiders. They tend to be boat rockers or whistleblowers. And the other crucial fact is that they are not part of the culture of clubbery.
Presenter asks
27:58Was in the end the game worth the candle [leaving the Labour Party to form the SDP]?
The Labour Party is not the party I would today wish to belong to. I am very happy to belong to the party I belong to. ... Because in the end I I think that first of all I passionately wish to see our civil liberties defended. I think on many areas like prison policy like education policy, like what I see as a gradual dismantlement of the National Health Service, Labor isn't doing what I would be happy with.
“I wanted to be an opera singer. In fact, I had a passionate desire to be an opera singer rather than a politician when I was a small girl. I imagined myself standing there, you know, singing the great arias and completely and absolutely bewitching the audience.”
“I think it's something about being a woman in politics, or was then, maybe still is, that you probably have to prove yourself more frequently, and by fighting more difficult seats, than you would if you were seen to be a reasonably promising man.”
“I think what would actually happen is that I'd settle down quite happily for a few weeks, then I'd get restless, and then I'd probably start striking out in all directions swimming to see whether I could find any other landfall which might perhaps be rather more part of the normal world.”
“I've never been a terribly highly organised person, and I've got away with it because I'm hugely energetic. But you do have to be pretty well organised, I think, to be a Prime Minister, and I'm not sure I was sufficiently well organised.”
“I remember listening to my parents vigorously discussing with one another and finding out that the only way I could get into the conversation, my brother would be there too, would be by saying something like, well, is Hitler going to bring the whole world to an end then? And then my parents would stop, look at me, listen, and I felt that that was how to get into the conversation.”
“I just felt I couldn't I remember feeling very strongly I cannot get up on an election platform. And advocate these policies because they are 180 degrees the opposite of where I actually stand, and I can't do it.”